Sony Ericsson's new hybrid smartphone and handheld game console is clearly targeted at a niche: those who play games.

The phone eliminates the need to carry a portable handheld game console like Sony's PSP Go (which as of May 2010, according to GameSpot, had only sold between 20,000 and 25,000 since launch in Australia) and a smartphone. But don't let that deter you from it; it's also a neat mobile that runs Google's latest mobile operating system, Android 2.3.2 (Gingerbread), making it not just a gaming platform.

As a smartphone, the Xperia Play operates as you would expect. It weighs 175 grams, has a 4-inch screen (480x854 resolution), 5.1 megapixel rear-facing camera and 1GHz processor. Memory wise, the phone only has 512MB onboard (400MB of which is available for apps to use). But with the included SD card, there is 8GB of space for storing data on. This can be upgraded to a 32GB card.

I particularly like the Twitter and Facebook integration via the Sony Ericsson Timescape app, which shows on the main screen an aesthetically pleasing view of all your friends' latest tweets and Facebook status updates. But, after having used it for over a week now, I believe this feature drains the battery fast, as well as slowing down processing power. I believe this to be the case because after I removed it most tasks began operating as normal.

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One thing I didn't enjoy about the Xperia Play was having to press physical buttons on the phone's screen far more often than I would have to on my personal phone of choice, the Apple iPhone. As most would know, the iPhone has one physical button on the screen. In mobile phone mode, the Xperia Play has four. The need to use the physical back button instead of swiping or pressing an onscreen button frustrated me, as it requires far more pressure than an onscreen button would need.

One example of my frustration being demonstrated was when I used the web browser on the Xperia Play. I opened it and Googled something. Once I had finished doing so I wanted to open up the Sydney Morning Herald website in a new window so I could save the Google search. But to do so I had to press the physical menu button and then the onscreen “new window” button before I could then type smh.com.au into the address bar.

On my iPhone, to open a new window, I would just press the onscreen windows button to view open web pages and then press “new page”. What's more is that the buttons don't have a backlight, making it difficult to differentiate between them at night.

Still on the topic of the web browser, it's speedy if you just want to view static content. But when it comes to viewing dynamic multimedia applications that utilise Adobe's Flash plugin, it doesn't do so well. For example, when trying to watch a Fairfax video from smh.com.au, it lagged really badly. I could hear the sound but the video's FPS (frames per second) rate was horrendous. It appeared to only be doing about 2 frames a second when I tested it.

One last (and, I think, very important) experience I wish to share about the web browser is the fact you can speak to it. So say I want to learn how to cook roast duck, if I press the onscreen microphone button and say "roast duck", it searches for it without the need to use the onscreen keyboard. This certainly helps save time, especially considering I hadn't quite managed to master the onscreen keyboard, which I found to be too small for my fingers.

Out of pure curiosity, I began to wonder whether Google's Android-based operating system would let me search for an expletive using voice control. So I tried telling it to search for a swear word starting with "f". Did it work? No! It was obvious the phone knew what I was searching for as it had replaced the word with four hashes (the amount of letters the expletive I used contained). This is not your phone Google! You should not be allowed to censor it out of the box. If I want my searches censored I would rather the option to change a setting.

Moving right along, the way photos are displayed is amazing. In fact, this is the first smartphone I've seen that makes really good use of displaying a bunch of photos. It's just really pretty. Almost like dealing a deck of cards, photos, using two fingers, can slide from one pressure point on the screen to the other. I love this.

I'd show you in this review with a screengrab but guess what? It turns out that Android-based phones don't let you do screengrabs out of the box. You need to "root" them (don't look at me that way, I'm serious) or install what is known as the SDK (software developer kit). But even then, when I tried doing that the screengrabs were displayed with a red tint.

One Twitter user, James Polley (an ex-Google employee), linked me to this hilarious infographic, which shows just how easy it is to take screengrabs with popular devices compared to Android phones. In a nutshell, you have to see the photo gallery and how it's laid out to see how awesome it is.

Towards the end of my review of the Xperia Play it started doing strange things. Icons began to take time to display when I woke the phone up from sleep mode. It also began to lag a lot just in general. Was it the apps I installed? Had I begun to clog it up? I began removing some of the apps I had installed and voilà, it appeared to be much speedier. The apps I removed included a sound effects app I downloaded from the Android Market (similar to iTunes' app store) and an app that measures the amount of decibels there are in the air using the phone's microphone. The phone also crashed on me a couple of times.

As a handheld game console, the Xperia Play works well. It's the perfect size, too. I tested two games: Star Battalion and Crash Bandicoot. Both worked well, though the lag issue I mentioned earlier also affected these games. Their frame rate tended to lag every now and then, causing me to crash in Star Battalion on one occasion.

What I did find lacking, however, was the screen's maximum brightness levels. It just wasn't bright enough when I compared the brightness to my iPhone 4 and other phones I have sitting around my desk.

The controllers on the device (analog and digital) for gaming are pretty cool. Known as a D Pad, it really gives you a console experience albeit game play on a smaller screen. There's also the option to use a touch-sensitive controller on the slide out pad. Come to think of it, the greatest benefit of having the pad is that you don't block the screen when controlling a game. This is a huge benefit.

At launch, Sony says the Xperia Play will have access to about 50 game titles that will be optimised for it on the Google Android Market. Game developers will also be able to distribute their apps through Sony's own store, named PlayStation pocket, which I was unable to test as it has yet to launch in Australia.

Speaking of its launch, that will be sometime between May and June of this year, according to Sony, when Telstra, Optus and Vodafone will begin selling it in the colour black. Vodafone will have the exclusive rights to sell it in white.

In conclusion, the Xperia Play is a smartphone which has a unique feature (its game controllers) that will likely narrow its audience to just gamers. For me it was just too buggy to be my primary phone. I want a phone that is stable and in my testing the Xperia Play was not.